3193–The_Scale_of_Things.html

The Scale of Things

Sat on worlds I’ll never hear of, lit by suns I’ll never see,
Are there other part-time poets gazing out to not see me?
On a trillion trillion boulders, round a billion billion stars,
Are there alien consumers riding bikes or driving cars?
Will we ever hear them speaking, know their hopes or guess their dreams,
As they love away their lifetimes lit by other-moonly beams?

If you tried to count the atoms in a single grain of salt,
Or the molecules that flavour Scotland’s finest single malt,
You would start to see the vastness of the universal scale
And however hard you struggled your attempts would surely fail.
Though our minds are vastly complex they are like an earthworm’s brains,
When compared to all the wonders that our universe contains.

When they search they find that atoms are far emptier than space,
Now they’ve built a huge collider that may prove why that’s the case.
Other men make mighty mirrors that can see far back in time,
To before the fateful moment when things first crawled from the slime.
As I read through these researches I work hard to find a clue —
On these worlds across the cosmos, could there be another you?